2013.12.08

I typically write about a project after it’s done, but I thought I should turn that around and start writing about a project much closer to the start. So here’s Part 1 of the story of the MMPIS, the project more formally known as the Milwaukee Makerspace Pi-powered Information System, which is a kiosk at the makerspace which will provide members (and guests) with useful (and silly) information.

I’ve long had an interest in digital signage and kiosks, so after my recent Sir Like-A-Lot project, I felt like pursuing a kiosk for the Makerspace. We had a Raspberry Pi that had been floating around waiting for a project, and there’s a huge TV that jason g. brought in that we used only occasionally. Those two pieces and a few other things were all it took. Well, that and writing some code.

The heavy lifting is all provided by Screenly, and actually, it’s the Open Source Edition of Screenly. (Also on GitHub.) Screenly is a pretty nice open source kiosk application. I’ve discovered a few bugs, and have some feature requests, but it definitely works. I’ve been meaning to check out Concert and Xibo as well, but I’ve not dug into those yet.

The first group of screens is pretty simple, here’s a few grabs.

Here’s the main screen (for now) which tells you where you are (duh!) and shows the date and time. It also tells you where to park, has a quote from the wiki, and shows the upcoming events. Well, some of them. We’ll get into that in Part II.)

We’re also showing our Parking App to let members know which side of the street to park on. (This, as every other screen, may change in the future.)

We’ve also got our How Many Members Does Milwaukee Makerspace Have? page. The HMMDMMH page uses our member management software to let us boast about this impressive number.

The last two are just graphics that live on the Pi that runs Screenly. All the others are web pages out there on the big old Internet. Oh, I should note that the pages need to be fairly simple. Large, complex pages utilizing Javascript or other heavy lifting don’t do very well, due to the lightweight nature of the Raspberry Pi and the browser Screenly uses.

OK, that’s our intro to the MMPIS. In the next installment we’ll get into the events that the MMPIS shows, or should show.